Make Israeli democracy normal

Leftists, by their nature, are Machiavellian—or, rather, Orwellian. As real life clashes with their theories, they necessarily resort to hypocrisy as a means of survival.

Israeli Left defended a state which is both Jewish and ethnic-blind by noting that Arabs are too few to affect the state’s Jewishness democratically. Their position is factually incorrect: in a fragmented political spectrum, a coherent group of voters exerts disproportional influence. Arabs need not become a majority; at 20–30% they can control the Knesset. Jewish religious parties act as a lynchpin with only a 10-12% constituency.

The government avoids political apocalypse by bribing the Arabs with municipal subsidies so they vote for the ruling Jewish parties. As Arabs stream into previously Jewish towns, centralized voter-buying through Arab municipalities no longer works, and Arabs increasingly support their own parties.

Allowing a minority democratic rights as long as it is too small to exercise them is hypocritical. Though not necessarily evil, hypocrisy is counterproductive because it misinforms the majority. People brought up to believe in minority rights and ethnic-blind states demand such policies. The Israeli Left professed high-flown values and conducted harshly anti-Arab policies until the early 1970s. After the Right came to power, the Left had to follow up on its own rhetoric in order to distinguish itself from hardcore nationalists. A new generation of leftist Jews brainwashed with liberal values came to the polls and demanded honestly ethnic-blind policies. Centrist governments, accordingly, had to adopt an increasingly pro-Arab stance, even to the point of affirmative action. The State’s hypocrisy, as Machiavelli rightly noted, is an art suitable to exceptional rulers only, a temporary measure to realize one’s true goals.

Democracy in itself is not a problem. Classical Athenian democracy excluded newcomers and reserved political rights to the descendants of the core settlers. Rather, the problem lies in false liberalism. Proponents of textbook liberalism, such as Hume, would not imagine the right of an alien group to subvert a state’s character. Though not anti-Semitic, Hume was critical of Jews, and would hardly agree, say, to Jews imposing their values on England. American settlers—those liberals par excellence—fought Native Indians and expelled the Spanish. Ukrainian anarchists like Nestor Makhno—liberalism as fringe as it gets—killed off their ideological opponents. False liberalism declares a blank-slate society where all values are equal because none are official. In this framework, no values exist on a societal level. As such, fringe liberalism morphs into nihilism. Worse than nihilists, fringe liberals impose arbitrary values on society: one can criticize Israel but not Palestine, Judaism but not Islam, America but not Cuba.

False liberalism dictates multiculturalism despite the minorities’ inability to enforce it democratically. Israel could make Hebrew its only official language just like every European country does, ban the keffiyah just like France bans the hijjab, and prohibit the Naqba Day just like most countries ban separatist expression.

The cross on the Swedish flag reflects the culture of the country’s founders rather than that of the Muslim newcomers, though in absolute numbers the newcomers are more numerous than the descendants of the founders. Citizens of Muslim descent have fewer rights to imprint their culture on the state’s symbols than the descendants of the original citizens. In the real world, citizens are not equal politically, even in model democracies.

Israeli advances toward her Arabs are not democratically motivated, but premised entirely on a twisted understanding of liberalism.